Fuck Email

[Colonel Sanders]

Over the course of 25+ years, I've had 3-4 email accounts. Every single one at some point or another has eventually been overwhelmed.

About 8-9 months ago, I got a new one.

"This time, no more spam, no more bullshit. I'm only using this for things I need."

This morning I had to delete 90% of the 30 or so emails in my box. While this is nothing compared to my old work email, it's still aggravating as fuck. I don't need daily updates. Fuck off Southwest, I'll make reservations when I need to. Like I'm going to see my 10th email in 3 days and suddenly decide I need to take advantage of a flight to Denver despite never flying or even driving there a single time in my life.

Fuck off Progressive; you have my cars and house. It ain't getting any better than that.

The problem is that I might need to get ahold of these assholes so I have to let them inundate me daily with bullshit.

And work bullshit; thankfully I'm out of the business, but those assholes who sent confrontational chickenshit emails at 11 on Saturday night deserve to be hit by a slow moving car; not enough to hurt them seriously, but just enough to leave a giant bruise on their left asscheek.

The dawn of email and its subsequent ubiquity has invaded our lives and made them worse. I'll never go off grid and live like Ted Kazynski because I like warm water and don't want to shit in bucket, but I understand why one could get fed up enough to seriously consider it.

 

[ideologyhunter]

I am lately getting tons of scammers in my junk mail. I've won cash prizes, gorilla carts, Medicare kits, free spins in some kind of game, $100 gift certificates to stores I no longer shop at. It's really disheartening, how much criminality is on display in email accounts. To stay safe you have to become a total cynic and believe just about nothing you see. Delete it all without opening it.
Also, somehow, about 12 years ago, I started getting emails addressed to some Karl. A business in Canada tried to bill me as Karl. Political causes will contact me as Karl. I still get them every week, although I unsubscribe when I can to anyone who calls me Karl. Whoever this Karl is, he must share my political beliefs in a general way, but if I ever meet him I'll still want to punch him in the dick. If Karl is reading this, fuck off and get yourself out of my account.

 

[Elixir]

Delete it all without opening it.

Works for me.
Good advice, Karl!

 

[brewer]

My spam filter catches most of the junk, a few slip thur now and then. The spam file collects up to 40 a day.

 

[Toni]

My husband has a work around that seems to work well enough for him:

He uses a dedicated email address for all online purchases, donations, etc. It really cuts down on the spam.

He still deletes almost all of his emails without opening. Including, as it turns out, bills. Now, I tell trades people to just email/text me. I pay the bills anyway.

 

[bilby]

I have had the same hotmail account since the late 1990s. Every scammer and marketer on Earth has my email address. Because it ends in .com rather than .com.au, most of them think I must be American, so I get a load of phishing attempts targeting my US bank accounts, credit cards, and store loyalty programs, none of which I have ever had any dealings with. I do get some Australian stuff too, and for some reason a fair bit of Brazillian spam, despite my never having had anything at all to do with Brazil, and not speaking or using Potuguese.

I get a couple of hundred emails a day arriving in my spam folder; It's the work of a moment to scan them for any legitimate mail from people I was expecting to hear from, and then hit "Delete All".

I do wonder why spammers still love the "urgent" flag, which in my experience is 100% used only for spam; It should be called the "don't even look, this one is spam" flag. Something like 95% of my spam folder is flagged "urgent" and so gets deleted without further consideration - any legitimate effort to reach me that uses the "urgent" flag is, by definition, from somebody so clueless that they deserve to be ignored.

I have always been unconcerned about missing mail, email, phone calls, etc.; If a communication is important, they will try again by different means; If it is not important enough to send a cop to knock on my door, then it's really not important.

If it is genuinely urgent, I likely already know. I grew up before mobile telephones or email, so have no fear at all of being incommunicado. If the world is ending, I will find out anyway, and if it's not, it really wasn't that urgent.

Urgent and important are totally different things, and both are the sender's opinion, which I likely don't share.

MS seem to be pretty good at identifying spam, and my actual inbox only sees spam once or twice a month nowadays. Though sometimes I wonder how some of the more obvious stuff gets past their filters.